Edited by Scott Connors

From the Introduction

As the 110th anniversary of Lovecraft’s birth approached, his reputation
both popular and critical continued to grow. Despite the publication of several books by the
academic press, there has been a paucity of journal articles outside of Lovecraft
Studies. Attempts to place articles in non-specialist venues have met with limited success,
although pieces such as Joyce Carol Oates’ positive assessment in the New York Review
of Books have done as much to advance HPL’s reputation as Edmund Wilson’s
earlier negative response did to impede it. This raises the question as to whether academic
acceptance of Lovecraft should be the goal toward which scholars devote their energy. Would
academic acceptance lead to a situation where he is more studied than read? The recent Penguin
edition of The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories for their “Twentieth-Century
Classics” is a step in the right direction; after all, one advertising slogan for that
series is “the library of every thinking person.” In the final analysis this is, in
fact, how I think that Lovecraft would have liked to be remembered.